This is a blog about marketing, gadgets, travel, privacy and cyberspace. Especially, but not exclusively, for those with an interest in everything that can make the life of a frequent traveller into something vaguely resembling normalcy.

The Chairman of the Committee, a chap going by the slightly ominous name of Mr Smith, has now proposed a new piece of legislation, the Global Online Freedom Act. The act would restrict the ability of internet companies to censor their websites and search results, and force them disclose any filtering, if applied. In other words, it would render most of the current Gang of Four's activities in China (Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo) illegal, and put them at odds with the Chinese authorities.

Smith's proposed law would also call for global standards, of course to be monitored by an Office of Global Internet Freedom (which would immediately engage in a turf war with the US State Department's newly announced Global Internet Freedom Task Force).

Although most of this amounts to the usual meaningless political grandstanding (would the coined names be any clue?), the idea of establishing global standards for ethical behaviour in such thorny issues as how to comply with censorship is not bad.